TUDOR FICTION: is it all sex and scandal?

I thought I’d run out of things to say about Wolf Hall when my attention was drawn to Laura Miller’s article in Salon, in which she responds to the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall in the context of other Tudor texts. In it Miller sings the praises of Mantel’s serious approach to a period that she scathingly describes as ‘for chicks,’ applauding the way the author draws out the idea of the Tudor period marking the break from Medieval feudalism and the beginning of the modern world, with the increase of social mobility in figures like Cromwell.

This is all well and good and cogently argued, but Miller also takes an opportunity to serve a crushing and sweeping blow to pretty much all other fictional material set in the period. She compares Mantel’s ‘high-brow’ approach with what she disparagingly terms ‘princess novels’ or Tudor set fiction that is focused on women’s lives. Her main point being that such fiction foregrounds lascivious sex and scandal and in so doing makes it no different to schlocky high-school teen dramas.

Philippa Gregory comes in for a particularly contemptuous drubbing, accused of digging out uninteresting female figures from the past and padding out their stories with romance that has no historical validity. Though Miller makes her point well and there is legitimacy to some of what she says, certainly about the gratuitous soft-porn elements of the Showtime series The Tudors, and the wilful manipulation of history in the teen drama Reign, what she overlooks is the serious nature of some of the themes of much Tudor set fiction.

Even the more commercial, romance led, Tudor novels have a profound darkness that makes them a poor comparison to the teen dramas cited. Yes, there are parallels to situations in which young women are living at close quarters and competing for prestige. Miller correctly points out that in such novels much is made of clothing but refrains from exploring the value and symbolic resonance of women’s clothing in these texts. For the Tudors, an upstart family with a tenuous grip on the throne, clothing was a crucial indication of status and thus merits description. Indeed Mantle also employs, to great effect, descriptions of clothing to create a sense of the importance of the outward representation of rank and affiliation through apparel within the courtly arena, where position and allegiance were of primary significance.

The cumbersome clothing women were laced into was also a part of the broader denial of female freedom in much the same way 21st century women living in fundamentalist Islamic communities are required to cover and restrict their bodies. The early modern female body was a precious commodity and was at once expected to be a site of allure and yet also to be contained and kept out of sight to guard its value.

To view such narratives as inconsequential refuses to acknowledge that for these Tudor ‘princesses’ the stakes were vertiginously high. They describe a world in which young women were brutally murdered for political ends and had to negotiate a dangerous path through a male power structure that gave them no agency.

Surely any woman who can gain even a modicum of power in an oppressively misogynist system merits having her story told, and many of the generation of serious historians who are rediscovering such stories would agree. It is unhelpful to regard all such fiction as romantic clap-trap that uses sex as its narrative drive, when marriage was the primary route to power for women. What is noteworthy about these stories is that it becomes impossible to separate sexual and state policy. Princesses are interesting because of, rather than in spite of, the power that was invested in their bodies, and how they used that power makes for fascinating reading.

By comparing a novel about Anne Boleyn to Gossip Girl, Miller is refusing to acknowledge that these privileged young women are unlike their contemporary counterparts because their stories are inherently tragic – real tragedy that ends in brutal death – when he worst outcome in teen drama is social ostracisation. What could be more pitiful than the execution of of Catherine Howard. Yes, she may have been a shallow girl preoccupied with love (she was seventeen, for goodness' sake) but her life was caught up in a political vortex over which she had no control and as such it is worth inspecting as a means to understand the extraordinary lack of power such women – even queen consorts – had in those days. These women were rendered shallow and infantalised by the paternal hegemony to which they belonged. To compare them with modern women who have sexual and professional freedom, who are educated and, importantly, choose to be largely concerned with superficial matters is missing the point.

Early modern women had no freedom, yet they found ways to make themselves heard. For the first time the humanist project, led in England by Thomas More, encouraged education for women, albeit for a limited and privileged cohort, which was surely an important social change that merits our attention. Take Katherine Parr for example, a minor queen of apparently little political importance, but few are aware that she was one of the first women to publish an original text in the English language. At a time when women were obliged to be silent and submissive, to publish religious political texts was an audacious and dangerous act. Indeed these educated females laid the ground for an unprecedented half-century of female rule in England. To say such lives are not worth examining and reduce them to little more than titillating tales, plays into the hands of the misogyny that sought to silence them in the first place.

Because Cromwell’s story is essentially one of social mobility and money, doesn’t automatically invest it with greater legitimacy, as Miller suggests, indeed it could be said that as women’s bodies were a currency traded at the highest level their stories have equal importance from a socio-economic perspective. Social mobility too was mediated through the bodies of women. Consider how the minor landed gentry such as the Seymours and the Parrs became elevated in such a way. These women’s lives provide a vital key in understanding the period, so please let’s not do as David Starkey has long done, and dismiss them as trivial.

For Miller's article:
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/05/our_enduring_tudor_obsession_sex_ambition_wealth_and_power_never_go_out_of_style/

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of Tudor trilogy: Queen's Gambit, Sisters of Treason and Watch the Lady. ElizabethFremantle.com

Queen's Gambit, about the life of Katherine Parr, has been chosen for World Book Night.

The Alfred Jewel comes home: Sue Purkiss

The Alfred Jewel

There is great excitement in Somerset at the moment (no, it's true; in the hills and on the levels, they speak of little else!) because for just one month, a great treasure has come home. It's the Alfred Jewel, and it must be one of the most exquisite works of art ever to have been found in a field after having been lost for centuries.

It's surprisingly small - a mere 6.4 cm long. It consists of an enamelled picture of a man who holds a flowering plant in each hand. This image is set under a piece of rock crystal, which is encased in the most exquisitely chased gold setting. It's shaped like a tear drop, and the apex of this is 'carved' into an animal's head - maybe a boar or a dragon? - in whose jaws is an empty socket. The gold back plate is engraved  with a stylised plant design, while the reverse of the animal head is patterned with overlapping scales.

And very significantly, there is an inscription, worked into the framework in open letterwork. It says: AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN - 'Alfred ordered me to be made.'

The Alfred in question was almost certainly Alfred the Great - so this jewel is a direct link with him. We know this because it was found on the Somerset Levels in 1693, in a field near North Petherton, only a few miles from Athelney, where Alfred fled in 878 from the Viking leader Guthrum - and from which he emerged to fight a decisive battle at Edington. After this, for the rest of his reign Alfred had the upper hand, and so was able to get on with rebuilding Wessex and making life better for his people. He later founded a monastery at Athelney.

No-one knows for certain what the purpose of the jewel was. But that socket looks as if it was made as an attachment to something. Perhaps it was fixed onto a crown - but the smart money is on the theory that this was an aestel - a pointer: used to follow the writing in a book. It is known that Alfred gave copies of Pope Gregory's 9th century best-seller Pastoral Care to bishoprics throughout his kingdom, and that with each book he sent a precious aestel. Perhaps this was the one he gave to Athelney.

Who was the man in the picture? It has been suggested it's Alfred himself. This doesn't seem likely to me. So far as I know, there wasn't a tradition of portraiture at the time - and if you were going to make a portrait, there would be easier media to use than enamel. Perhaps it's a saint - we don't know. More questions: how and when was it lost? How did it survive, under the surface of a field, without harm, for hundreds of years? If it had been found today, the site would have been minutely investigated for clues - but of course none of that happened in the 17th century.

What did happen was that the jewel was given to the University of Oxford in 1718 by the antiquarian Thomas Palmer, the son of Nathaniel, who had been the owner of the land where the jewel was found. Not long after that, it was given to the Ashmolean Museum, and there it's been ever since.

The Ashmolean, which opened in 1683, was the first university museum in the world, and it was built to house the 'Cabinet of Curiosities' of Elias Ashmole. Philippa Gregory has a very interesting account of its founding in her novel Virgin Earth (which, by the way, along with its predecessor, Earthly Joys, is a really excellent read), which concerns the fortunes pf plant collectors and explorers John Tradescant and his son. She suggests that the core of the collection was that of the Tradescants, which had been tricked out of them by Ashmole. Whatever the truth of that - and the Tradescants' collection was certainly the foundation of Ashmole's - the Ashmolean was and is a treasure trove. I went there to see the Alfred Jewel some years ago, when I was researching my novel about Alfred, Warrior King. It took me ages to find it, and eventually I spotted it tucked a way in a dim corner of a crowded display case.

But since then the Ashmolean has been re-fashioned into a glorious space, and the Alfred Jewel, far from being hidden away, is a striking focal point with a display case that sets it off beautifully.

Only not this month, because we've got it - it's only on loan, but for these few weeks, it's home.

I went to see it the other day, and I marvelled over how tiny it is. How on earth could the maker even see to create such exquisite detail? And just to think, that Alfred (I have to admit, I think of him as 'my Alfred') actually held this in his hand! (Because I'm sure he did. He ordered it to be made, so he would certainly have inspected it when it was done.)

Seeing the Jewel was the purpose of my visit, but I can't finish without a word about the Museum of Somerset in Taunton. Like the Ashmolean, it has been recently remodelled, and it's gorgeous. In fact, it's so gorgeous that it deserves more than a skimpy paragraph. So on second thoughts, I'll give it a post of its own next month. When the Alfred Jewel will have left us again, and we will be bereft...

Shelve under Venus - or Mars? - Celia Rees

Imagine my surprise and delight when I opened my copy of the Sunday Times and found a double page spread in the Culture section devoted to historical fiction. Not only that, but our very own Mary Hoffman was quoted along with  fellow History Girl, Louise Berridge. Our History Girls blog got a mention, too. I was pleased and proud, although not so happy about the theme of the piece.

I dislike gender divides in fiction. I dislike gender divides anywhere. I understand why female writers hide behind the anonymity of initials or an androgynous first name and I certainly wouldn't want to offend or upset fellow History Girls, A.L. Berridge and H.M. Castor. I don't feel I'm 'outing' them, by the way, any lingering doubts as to gender should be dispelled by the fact that they are both History GIRLS. I know it is often not a writer's choice but pressure from her publisher which makes her adopt the initials, but is it really necessary? The pretence is tissue thin. As A.L. Berridge points out, all the reader has to do is open the cover to find that Louise lives in St Albans with her husband. Maybe I'm just jealous because I don't have a middle name, and there's not much to be done with Celia, so I'm destined to stay in the Girlie Ghetto, but we don't have an H.M. Mantel, E. L. Catton, or a Phil Gregory for that matter, and as the Sunday Times article goes on to point out, having a recognisably female first name does not prevent a writer from winning literary prizes or topping the best seller list.

As a writer of Young Adult fiction, where this kind of gender discrimination is rife - if someone mentions a writer by way of a double initial my first reaction is what does she write? - I guess I should be used to this, but it continues to annoy me that women have to don this nomenclatural disguise to even think of appealing to male readers.  What is it with these boys and men, anyway? Do they think that picking up a book written by a woman with a woman on the cover will cause some diminution of their masculinity? Or do they think the book will be per se girlie, all frocks and romance and not for them? Are they incapable of reading the blurb on the back? There is the implicit implication that women writers are somehow unable to take a male point of view, or write about things (war and gore) that might interest men. Setting aside the crude and insulting assumption that male readers are only interested in said topics, there are a legion of examples that prove women writers can shoot a bow and wield a broadsword with the best of them. Oddly, the opposite is never mooted, I guess because it is assumed that no red blooded male writer would possibly want to write from a woman's of view.

What I find most disturbing are the prejudices and assumptions swirling around this perceived gender divide. There is a faint feeling of outrage that, at the moment, female writers are outselling men, that more girls and women read than boys and men. Rather in the way of girls gaining better exam results, this is not seen as a cause for celebration, but rather a reason for hand wringing: the answer obviously being to downplay the female and pander to the male.

Genderisation diminishes us all, writer and reader alike. This tightening straightjacket is being imposed by market driven publishers panicked by the general decline of reading as a whole. It is up to us to resist, to buck the trend. No part or period of history, no human activity, is all male or all female and to suggest otherwise is just ridiculous. As Philippa Gregory has demonstrated, the bloody Wars of the Roses was not an entirely male affair, there were powerful women there who had more on their minds than what kind of head gear they should be wearing. Hilary Mantel has written two Booker Prize winners from the point of view of one of the most powerful and ruthless men in English History.  The publishers should be supporting and encouraging novels which break gender lines, rather than re-enforcing them.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Elizabeth I’s Virginity, the Fate of the Princes in the Tower and Other Things We Know We Don’t Know in Historical Fiction – By Elizabeth Fremantle

It is rare that a definitive truth emerges from history, like that of Richard III’s remains, proving that he did indeed suffer from scoliosis. But he also suffered from Tudor propaganda that, through writers like More and Shakespeare, sought to depict him as monstrous. As sixteenth century beliefs regarded deformity as the Devil’s work a crooked shape must have been a convenient way to describe his inner wickedness.  But much recent fiction has attempted to rehabilitate Richard of York. Philippa Gregory in her Cousins’ War series is clear: Richard is the good guy (give or take a little ruthlessness) without even the slightest crookedness about the spine – the antithesis of Shakespeare’s black-hearted crookback. Gregory’s agenda is, I suppose, to articulate an opposing story to the one that has endured for five hundred years – the York story – as a way to illuminate the lives of the women of the period and her straight-backed Richard is an intrinsic part of this. Fiction gives us license to explore the possibilities thrown up by fragments in the historical record. But the king in the car park is an undeniable truth, creating a shift of knowledge, which perhaps works to devalue Gregory’s fictional perspective – make it seem incomplete or less based in truth.

                                     Anthony Sher as Richard III – Royal Shakespeare Company 

What Richard III’s bones cannot tell us though, is whether the princes in the tower died at his hand or by his order. This story is perhaps the most enduring of the historical mysteries and has been explored endlessly in fiction. Emma Darwin in the excellent A Secret Alchemy cleverly creates a fictional scheme wherein both the Richard III camp and the Lancastrians are equally culpable, whereas Gregory’s villain is unequivocally a Margaret Beaufort driven by a combination of blind ambition and religious fervour. But her story has a further complication, which leaves one son alive to reappear later as the pretender Perkin Warbeck. Weir however, in A Dangerous Inheritance, keeps us in the dark, something that Amazon reviewers found frustrating, as if somehow they were expecting a definitive truth to emerge from her fictional story. Even genetic tests on the boys’ suspected remains would not shed light on the murderer. We would however, learn where and at what age they died and whether one of them did survive to potentially return as Warbeck.

                                                             The Princes in the Tower

There are many truths we will never know. I have been asked surprisingly often whether the Virgin Queen was truly a virgin and I’m always surprised that people think I might know something that historians have not got to the bottom of in hundreds of years of poring through the historical record. Such a question was even posed during Elizabeth’s lifetime when rumour and scandal ran rife and many sought to discredit her by destroying her reputation. As she plays a large part in my Tudor trilogy, which covers her life from girlhood to old age I had to engage with the problem of how to convey an unknown in a convincing way in my fiction. Had Elizabeth been a central character I would have been compelled to take a position on the question of her love life, but as she inhabits the margins of my novels and is only seen through the eyes of other characters it was possible to show her from a perspective of partial view.

When, as a fourteen year old, and living in the household of the dowager Queen Katherine Parr, Elizabeth had something on the spectrum between a flirtation and a full blown affair with the man in the position of stepfather to her, Parr’s fourth husband Thomas Seymour. We know a certain amount about this ‘affair’ thanks to Elizabeth’s close companion and mother figure Katherine Astley’s testimony at Seymour’s subsequent treason trial. Astley describes in detail the mornings when Seymour would visit Elizabeth in her bedchamber in which a certain amount of slap and tickle took place, sufficient for Astley to have words with Seymour. It is also suggested that Parr joined in some of these ‘games,’ in particular a puzzling scene in which Parr is said to have held Elizabeth down while Seymour cut her dress into ‘a hundred pieces’. Finally we learn that Parr discovered Elizabeth and Seymour in ‘an embrace’, which precipitated the girl being sent away from the household.

                                                  Elizabeth I as a girl – the Royal Collection

In describing this episode in Queen’s Gambit I chose to take the liberty of setting it in a bed with the guilty couple naked, but deliberately held back from showing the sexual act as I wanted to leave it up to the reader to decide what had really happened. The only evidence we have from the horse’s mouth, as it were, is in a reported conversation in which Elizabeth confesses to Jane Grey that she ‘lay with’ Seymour, another statement that remains open to interpretation by the reader.  Alison Weir, however, in The Lady Elizabethtrod an entirely different path, fully exploiting contemporary rumour, and depicting the Seymour affair as ending in a secret pregnancy. Interestingly, as Anna Whitelock points out in Elizabeth’s Bedfellows, Elizabeth left strict instructions that she was not to be disembowelled or examined after death, fuelling notions that she had something to hide, and most sources agree that her wishes were obeyed. I occasionally wonder whether, if some evidence should emerge of an early pregnancy, my own interpretation in Queen’s Gambit might seem incomplete.

                                                      A depiction of Amy Robsart's death

The death of Amy Robsart, who was discovered with a broken neck at the foot of a flight of steps in 1560, is another Elizabethan story riven with uncertainties: was it suicide, was it an accident, was it murder and, if so, by who’s hand? Fingers at the time pointed towards her husband, Elizabeth’s favourite, Leicester, who, people believed, had his sights set on marrying the Queen; but then all sorts of dreadful deeds were blamed on Leicester, who was deeply resented in court circles. A TV mini series has an ailing and beleaguered Emilia Fox, playing Amy Robsart, throwing herself into a stairwell – so suicide. In my second novel Sisters of Treason I have forwarded the possibility that perhaps it was the Queen’s loyal statesman William Cecil, Leicester’s enemy, who had the most to gain from Amy Robsart’s death – so perhaps murder. It is only a suggestion mind, and born of gossip and speculation amongst my characters, because I firmly believe that, though readers often hope for the satisfaction of finding the loose ends of history neatly tied, there is certainly a place for ambiguity in historical fiction.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novel Queen's Gambit, about Katherine Parr is out in hardback now and paperback early 2014. Sister's of Treason will be out in spring 2014.